the bosom, "I do not wish to be taken to any place where I would
disgrace you. I know how impossible I am. Yet this suit of clothes cost
me twelve hundred dollars in Confederate scrip. These boots are not
much to look at, but they were made by a scion of one of the first
families of the South; I paid him two hundred dollars for them, and he
was right glad to get it. To such miserable straits have Southern
gentlemen been reduced by the vandals of the North. Perhaps you don't
like the Confederate gray?"
"Bother your boots and your clothes!" I cried. "Nobody will notice them
here." (Which was true enough, for in those days the land was strewed
with shreds and patches of the war. The drivers and conductors of
street cars wore overcoats made out of shoddy army blankets, and the
dustmen went about in cast-off infantry caps.) "What troubles me is
that I can't wait to start you on your breakfast."
"I reckon I don't need much starting."
I explained the situation to him, and suggested that instead of going
to the restaurant, he should go directly to my house, and be served by
Mrs. Wesley, to whom I would write a line on a leaf of my
memorandum-book. I did not suggest this step in the first instance
because the little oyster saloon, close at hand, had seemed to offer
the shortest cut to my cousin's relief.
"So you're married?" said he.
"Yes--and you?"
"I haven't taken any matrimony in mine."
"I've been married six years, and have two boys."
"No! How far is your house?" he inquired. "Will I have to take a caar?"
"A 'caar'? Ah, yes--that is to say, no. A car isn't worth while. You
see that bakery two blocks from here, at the right? That's on the
corner of Clinton Place. You turn down there. You'll notice in looking
over what I've written to Mrs. Wesley that she is to furnish you with
some clothes, such as are worn by--by vandals of the North in
comfortable circumstances."
"Tom Wesley, you are as good as a straight flush. If you ever come down
South, when this cruel war is over, our people will treat you like one
of the crowned heads--only a devilish sight better, for the crowned
heads rather went back on us. If England had recognized the Southern
Confederacy"--
"Never mind that; your tenderloin steak is cooling."
"Don't mention it! I go. But I say, Tom--Mrs. Wesley? Really, I am
hardly presentable. Are there other ladies around?"
"There's no one but Mrs. Wesley."
"Do you think I can count on her being glad to see me at such short
notice?"
"She will be a sister to you," I said warmly.
"Well, I reckon that you two are a pair of trumps. Au revoir! Be good
to yourself."
With this, my cousin strode off, tucking my note to Mrs. Wesley inside
the leather belt buckled tightly around his waist. I lingered a moment
on the curbstone, and looked after him with a sensation of mingled
pride, amusement, and curiosity. That was my Family; there it was, in
that broad back and those not ungraceful legs, striding up Sixth
Avenue, with its noble intellect intent on thoughts of breakfast. I was
thankful that it had not been written in the book of fate that this
limb of the closely pruned Wesley tree should be lopped off by the
sword of war. But as Washington Flagg turned into Clinton Place, I had
a misgiving. It was hardly to be expected that a person of his
temperament, fresh from a four years' desperate struggle and a
disastrous defeat, would refrain from expressing his views on the
subject. That those views would be somewhat lurid, I was convinced by
the phrases which he had dropped here and there in the course of our
conversation. He was, to all intents and purposes, a Southerner. He had
been a colonel in Stonewall Jackson's brigade. And Mrs. Wesley was such
an uncompromising patriot! It was in the blood. Her great-grandfather,
on the mother's side, had frozen to death at Valley Forge in the winter
of 1778, and her grandfather, on the paternal side, had had his head
taken off by a round-shot from his Majesty's sloop of war Porpoise in
1812. I believe that Mrs. Wesley would have applied for a divorce from
me if I had not served a year in the army at the beginning of the war.
I began bitterly to regret that I had been obliged to present my cousin
to her so abruptly. I wished it had occurred to me to give him a word
or two of caution, or that I had had sense enough to adhere to my first
plan of letting him feed himself at the little oyster establishment
round the corner. But wishes and regrets could not now mend the matter;
so I hailed an approaching horse-car, and comforted myself on the rear
platform with the reflection that perhaps the colonel would not wave
the palmetto leaf too vigorously, if he waved it at all, in the face of
Mrs. Wesley.
II
The awkwardness of the situation disturbed me more or less during the
forenoon; but fortunately it was a half-holiday, and I was able to
leave the office shortly after one o'clock.
I do not know how I came to work myself into such a state of mind on
the way up town, but as I stepped from the horse-car and turned into
Clinton Place I had a strong apprehension that I should find some
unpleasant change in the facial aspect of the little red brick building
I occupied--a scowl, for instance, on the brown-stone eyebrow over the
front door. I actually had a feeling of relief when I saw that the
facade presented its usual unaggressive appearance.
As I entered the hall, Mrs. Wesley, who had heard my pass-key grating
in the lock, was coming down-stairs.
"Is my cousin here, Clara?" I asked, in the act of reaching up to hang
my hat on the rack.
"No," said Mrs. Wesley. There was a tone in that monosyllable that
struck me. "But he has been here?"
"He has been here," replied Mrs. Wesley. "May be you noticed the
bell-knob hanging out one or two inches. Is Mr. Flagg in the habit of
stretching the bell-wire of the houses he visits, when the door is not
opened in a moment? Has he escaped from somewhere?"
"Escaped from somewhere!" I echoed. "I only asked; he behaved so
strangely."
"Good heavens, Clara! what has the man done? I hope that nothing
unpleasant has happened. Flagg is my only surviving relative--I may say
our only surviving relative--and I should be pained to have any
misunderstanding. I want you to like him."
"There was a slight misunderstanding at first," said Clara, and a smile
flitted across her face, softening the features which had worn an air
of unusual seriousness and preoccupation. "But it is all right now,
dear. He has eaten everything in the house--that bit of spring lamb I
saved expressly for you!--and has gone down town 'on a raid,' as he
called it, in your second-best suit--the checked tweed. I did all I
could for him."
"My dear, something has ruffled you. What is it?"
"Wesley," said my wife slowly, and in a perplexed way, "I have had so
few relatives that perhaps I don't know what to do with them, or what
to say to them."
"You always say and do what is just right."
"I began unfortunately with Mr. Flagg, then. Mary was washing the
dishes when he rang, and I went to the door. If he IS our cousin, I
must say that he cut a remarkable figure on the doorstep."
"I can imagine it, my dear, coming upon you so unexpectedly. There were
peculiarities in his costume."
"For an instant," Clara went on, "I took him for the ashman, though the
ashman always goes to the area door, and never comes on Tuesdays; and
then, before the creature had a chance to speak, I said, 'We don't want
any,' supposing he had something to sell. Instead of going away
quietly, as I expected he would do, the man made a motion to come in,
and I slammed the door on him."
"Dear! dear!"
"What else could I do, all alone in the hall? How was I to know that he
was one of the family?"
"What happened next?"
"Well, I saw that I had shut the lapel of his coat in the door-jamb,
and that the man couldn't go away if he wanted to ever so much. Wasn't
it dreadful? Of course I didn't dare to open the door, and there he
was! He began pounding on the panels and ringing the bell in a manner
to curdle one's blood. He rang the bell at least a hundred times in
succession. I stood there with my hand on the bolt, not daring to move
or breathe. I called to Mary to put on her things, steal out the lower
way, and bring the police. Suddenly everything was still outside, and
presently I saw a piece of paper slowly slipping in over the threshold,
oh, so slyly! I felt my hands and feet grow cold. I felt that the man
himself was about to follow that narrow strip of paper; that he was
bound to get in that way, or through the keyhole, or somehow. Then I
recognized your handwriting. My first thought was that you had been
killed in some horrible accident"--
"And had dropped you a line?"
"I didn't reason about it, Wesley; I was paralyzed. I picked up the
paper, and read it, and opened the door, and Mr. Flagg rushed in as if
he had been shot out of something. 'Don't want any?' he shouted. 'But I
do! I want some breakfast!' You should have heard him."
"He stated a fact, at any rate. To be sure he might have stated it less
vivaciously." I was beginning to be amused.
"After that he was quieter, and tried to make himself agreeable, and we
laughed a little together over my mistake--that is, HE laughed. Of
course I got breakfast for him--and such a breakfast!"
"He had been without anything to eat since yesterday."
"I should have imagined," said Clara, "that he had eaten nothing since
the war broke out."
"Did he say anything in particular about himself?" I asked, with a
recurrent touch of anxiety.
"He wasn't particular what he said about himself. Without in the least
seeing the horror of it, he positively boasted of having been in the
rebel army."
"Yes--a colonel."
"That makes it all the worse," replied Clara.
"But they had to have colonels, you know."
"Is Mr. Flagg a Virginian, or a Mississippian, or a Georgian?"
"No, my dear; he was born in the State of Maine; but he has lived so
long in the South that he's quite one of them for the present. We must
make allowances for him, Clara. Did he say anything else?"
"Oh, yes."
"What did he say?"
"He said he'd come back to supper."
It was clear that Clara was not favorably impressed by my cousin, and,
indeed, the circumstances attending his advent were not happy. It was
likewise clear that I had him on my hands, temporarily at least. I
almost reproach myself even now for saying "on my hands," in connection
with my own flesh and blood. The responsibility did not so define
itself at the time. It took the form of a novel and pleasing duty. Here
was my only kinsman, in a strange city, without friends, money, or
hopeful outlook. My course lay before me as straight as a turnpike. I
had a great deal of family pride, even if I did not have any family to
speak of, and I was resolved that what little I had should not perish
for want of proper sustenance.
Shortly before six o'clock Washington Flagg again presented himself at
our doorstep, and obtained admission to the house with fewer
difficulties than he had encountered earlier in the day.
I do not think I ever saw a man in destitute circumstances so entirely
cheerful as my cousin was. Neither the immediate past, which must have
been full of hardships, nor the immediate future, which was not lavish
of its promises, seemed to give him any but a momentary and impersonal
concern. At the supper-table he talked much and well, exceedingly well,
I thought, except when he touched on the war, which he was continually
doing, and then I was on tenter-hooks. His point of view was so opposed
to ours as to threaten in several instances to bring on an engagement
all along the line. This calamity was averted by my passing something
to him at the critical moment. Now I checked his advance by a slice of
cold tongue, and now I turned his flank with another cup of tea; but I
questioned my ability to preserve peace throughout the evening. Before
the meal was at an end there had crept into Clara's manner a polite
calmness which I never liked to see. What was I going to do with these
two after supper, when my cousin Flagg, with his mind undistracted by
relays of cream toast, could give his entire attention to the Lost
Cause?
As we were pushing the chairs back from the table, I was inspired with
the idea of taking our guest off to a cafe concert over in the
Bowery--a volksgarten very popular in those days. While my whispered
suggestion was meeting Clara's cordial approval, our friend Bleeker
dropped in. So the colonel and Bleeker and I passed the evening with
"lager-beer and Meyer-beer," as my lively kinsman put it; after which
he spent the night on the sofa in our sitting-room, for we had no spare
chamber to place at his disposal.
"I shall be very snug here," he said, smiling down my apologies. "I'm a
'possum for adapting myself to any odd hollow."
The next morning my cousin was early astir, possibly not having found
that narrow springless lounge all a 'possum could wish, and joined us
in discussing a plan which I had proposed overnight to Mrs. Wesley,
namely, that he should hire an apartment in a quiet street near by, and
take his meals--that was to say, his dinner--with us, until he could
make such arrangements as would allow him to live more conveniently. To
return South, where all the lines of his previous business connections
were presumably broken, was at present out of the question.
"The war has ruined our people," said the colonel. "I will have to put
up for a while with a place in a bank or an insurance office, or
something in that small way. The world owes me a living, North or
South."
His remark nettled me a little, though he was, of course, unaware of my
relations with the Savonarola Fire Insurance Company, and had meant no
slight.
"I don't quite see that," I observed.
"Don't see what?"
"How the world contrived to get so deeply into your debt--how all the
points of the compass managed it."
"Thomas, I didn't ask to be born, did I?"
"Probably not."
"But I was born, wasn't I?"
"To all appearances."
"Well, then!"
"But you cannot hold the world in general responsible for your birth.
The responsibility narrows itself down to your parents."
"Then I am euchred. By one of those laws of nature which make this
globe a sweet spot to live on, they were taken from me just when I
needed them most--my mother in my infancy, and my father in my
childhood."
"But your father left you something?"
"The old gentleman left me nothing, and I've been steadily increasing
the legacy ever since."
"What did you do before the war?" inquired Clara sympathetically. His
mention of his early losses had touched her.
"Oh, a number of things. I read law for a while. At one time I was
interested in a large concern for the manufacture of patent metallic
burial cases; but nobody seemed to die that year. Good health raged
like an epidemic all over the South. Latterly I dabbled a little in
stocks--and stocks dabbled in me."
"You were not successful, then?" I said.
"I was at first, but when the war fever broke out and the Southern
heart was fired, everything that didn't go down went up."
"And you couldn't meet your obligations?"
"That wasn't the trouble--I couldn't get away from them," replied the
colonel, with a winsome smile. "I met them at every corner."
The man had a fashion of turning his very misfortunes into
pleasantries. Surely prosperity would be wasted on a person so gifted
with optimism. I felt it to be kind and proper, however, to express the
hope that he had reached the end of his adversity, and to assure him
that I would do anything I could in the world to help him.
"Tom Wesley, I believe you would."
Before the close of that day Mrs. Wesley, who is a lady that does not
allow any species of vegetation to accumulate under her feet, had
secured a furnished room for our kinsman in a street branching off from
Clinton Place, and at a moderate additional expense contracted to have
him served with breakfast on the premises. Previous to this I had dined
down town, returning home in the evening to a rather heavy tea, which
was really my wife's dinner--Sheridan and Ulysses (such were the heroic
names under which the two little Wesleys were staggering) had their
principal meal at midday. It was, of course, not desirable that the
colonel should share this meal with them and Mrs. Wesley in my absence.
So we decided to have a six o'clock dinner; a temporary disarrangement
of our domestic machinery, for my cousin Flagg would doubtless find
some acceptable employment before long, and leave the household free to
slip back into its regular grooves.
An outline of the physical aspects of the exotic kinsman who had so
unexpectedly added himself to the figures at our happy fireside seems
not out of place here. The portrait, being the result of many sittings,
does not in some points convey the exact impression he made upon us in
the earlier moments of our intimacy; but that is not important.
Though Washington Flagg had first opened his eyes on the banks of the
Penobscot, he appeared to have been planned by nature to adorn the
banks of the Rappahannock. There was nothing of the New Englander about
him. The sallowness of his complexion and the blackness of his straight
hair, which he wore long, were those of the typical Southerner. He was
of medium height and loosely built, with a kind of elastic grace in his
disjointedness. When he smiled he was positively handsome; in repose
his features were nearly plain, the lips too indecisive, and the eyes
lacking in lustre. A sparse tuft of beard at his chin--he was otherwise
smoothly shaven--lengthened the face. There was, when he willed it,
something very ingratiating in his manner--even Clara admitted that--a
courteous and unconventional sort of ease. In all these surface
characteristics he was a geographical anomaly. In the cast of his mind
he was more Southern than the South, as a Northern convert is apt to
be. Even his speech, like the dyer's arm, had taken tints from his
environment. One might say that his pronunciation had literally been
colored by his long association with the colored race. He invariably
said flo' for floor, and djew for dew; but I do not anywhere attempt a
phonetic reproduction of his dialect; in its finer qualities it was too
elusive to be snared in a network of letters. In spite of his
displacements, for my cousin had lived all over the South in his
boyhood, he had contrived to pick up a very decent education. As to his
other attributes, he shall be left to reveal them himself.
III
Mrs. Wesley kindly assumed the charge of establishing Washington Flagg
in his headquarters, as he termed the snug hall bedroom in Macdougal
Street. There were numberless details to be looked to. His wardrobe,
among the rest, needed replenishing down to the most unconsidered
button, for Flagg had dropped into our little world with as few
impedimenta as if he had been a newly born infant. Though my condition,
like that desired by Agur, the son of Jakeh, was one of neither poverty
nor riches, greenbacks in those days were greenbacks. I mention the
fact in order to say that my satisfaction in coming to the rescue of my
kinsman would have been greatly lessened if it had involved no
self-denial whatever.
The day following his installation I was partly annoyed, partly amused,
to find that Flagg had purchased a rather expensive meerschaum pipe and
a pound or two of Latakia tobacco.
"I cannot afford to smoke cigars," he explained. "I must economize
until I get on my feet."
Perhaps it would have been wiser if I had personally attended to his
expenditures, minor as well as major, but it did not seem practicable
to leave him without a cent in his pocket. His pilgrimage down town
that forenoon had apparently had no purpose beyond this purchase,
though on the previous evening I had directed his notice to two or
three commercial advertisements which impressed me as worth looking
into. I hesitated to ask him if he had looked into them. A collateral
feeling of delicacy prevented me from breathing a word to Clara about
the pipe.
Our reconstructed household, with its unreconstructed member, now moved
forward on the lines laid down. Punctually at a quarter to six P. M. my
cousin appeared at the front door, hung his hat on the rack, and passed
into the sitting-room, sometimes humming in the hall a bar or two of
The Bonny Blue Flag that bears a Single Star, to the infinite distaste
of Mrs. Wesley, who was usually at that moment giving the finishing
touches to the dinner-table. After dinner, during which I was in a
state of unrelaxed anxiety lest the colonel should get himself on too
delicate ground, I took him into my small snuggery at the foot of the
hall, where coffee was served to us, Mrs. Wesley being left to her own
devices.
For several days matters went as smoothly as I could have hoped. I
found it so easy, when desirable, to switch the colonel on to one of my
carefully contrived side tracks that I began to be proud of my skill
and to enjoy the exercise of it. But one evening, just as we were in
the middle of the dessert, he suddenly broke out with, "We were
conquered by mere brute force, you know!"
"That is very true," I replied. "It is brute force that tells in war.
Wasn't it Napoleon who said that he had remarked that God was generally
on the side which had the heaviest artillery?"
"The North had that, fast enough, and crushed a free people with it."
"A free people with four millions of slaves?" observed Mrs. Wesley
quietly.
"Slavery was a patriarchal institution, my dear lady. But I reckon it
is exploded now. The Emancipation Proclamation was a dastardly war
measure."
"It did something more and better than free the blacks," said Mrs.
Wesley; "it freed the whites. Dear me!" she added, glancing at Sheridan
and Ulysses, who, in a brief reprieve from bed, were over in one corner
of the room dissecting a small wooden camel, "I cannot be thankful
enough that the children are too young to understand such sentiments."
The colonel, to my great relief, remained silent; but as soon as Clara
had closed the dining-room door behind her, he said, "Tom Wesley, I
reckon your wife doesn't wholly like me."
"She likes you immensely," I cried, inwardly begging to be forgiven.
"But she is a firm believer in the justice of the Northern cause."
"May be she lost a brother, or something."
"No; she never had a brother. If she had had one, he would have been
killed in the first battle of the war. She sent me to the front to be
killed, and I went willingly; but I wasn't good enough; the enemy
wouldn't have me at any price after a year's trial. Mrs. Wesley feels
very strongly on this subject, and I wish you would try, like a good
fellow, not to bring the question up at dinner-time. I am squarely
opposed to your views myself, but I don't mind what you say as she
does. So talk to me as much as you want to, but don't talk in Clara's
presence. When persons disagree as you two do, argument is useless.
Besides, the whole thing has been settled on the battlefield, and it
isn't worth while to fight it all over again on a table-cloth."
"I suppose it isn't," he assented good-naturedly. "But you people up at
the North here don't suspicion what we have been through. You caught
only the edge of the hurricane. The most of you, I take it, weren't in
it at all."
"Our dearest were in it."
"Well, we got whipped, Wesley, I acknowledge it; but we deserved to
win, if ever bravery deserved it."
"The South was brave, nobody contests that; but ''t is not enough to be
brave'--
"'The angry valor dashed
On the awful shield of God,'
as one of our poets says."
"Blast one of your poets! Our people were right, too."
"Come, now, Flagg, when you talk about your people, you ought to mean
Northerners, for you were born in the North."
"That was just the kind of luck that has followed me all my life. My
body belongs to Bangor, Maine, and my soul to Charleston, South
Carolina."
"You've got a problem there that ought to bother you."
"It does," said the colonel, with a laugh.
"Meanwhile, my dear boy, don't distress Mrs. Wesley with it. She is
ready to be very fond of you, if you will let her. It would be
altogether sad and shameful if a family so contracted as ours couldn't
get along without internal dissensions."